Fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld is being investigated by French broadcasting watchdogs after some comments he made about immigrants being welcomed in Germany got him in hot water with viewers.

Evoking guilt of the Holocaust as the impetus for Merkel to invite unlimited numbers of asylum seekers into Germany during the migrant crisis, Lagerfeld said: "One can not - even if there are decades between them - kill millions of Jews and then bring millions of their worst enemies in their place", Kronen Zeitungreports.

"I know someone in Germany who took a young Syrian in and after four days said, "The greatest thing Germany invented was the Holocaust", he added.

Lagerfeld, who is rarely afraid of controversy, said he was going to "say something horrific" before criticising the chancellor for the "huge error" of accepting so many refugees from war-torn Syria and elsewhere.

The Guardian reported that France's media regulator received complaints about the designer's comments from several hundred people, and the French television regulator, CSA, is examining the program.

Around 1 million mainly Muslim migrants - a lot of them from war-torn Syria - are estimated to have entered Germany since 2015, as part of the worst refugee crisis since World War II.

However, Merkel's CDU party and its Bavarian SCU sister party agreed in October to cap Germany's intake of asylum seekers at 200,000 a year. Merkel has been criticized both domestically and overseas for her open-door policy for those fleeing war and persecution, with critics citing strains on the social welfare system and a rise in migrant-related crimes.